The Future, Coming Soon: Self-Driving Cars Mainstream by 2025

At the dawn of the automobile age, driving a car wasn’t a high status activity. Not driving it was. And within a decade, the auto business could return full circle to the concept of motorists as mainly passengers.

The consensus among auto industry technologists, gathered in Detroit this week for SAE International World Congress, is that by the middle of this decade, cars that can largely pilot themselves through traffic jams will be offered for sale.

By 2020, cars capable of taking over most of the work of high speed driving could debut, and by 2025, fully autonomous vehicles might hit the streets in meaningful numbers.

Those dates are still “guesstimates,” said Christian Schumacher, head of advanced driver assistance systems in North America for German automotive technology giant Continental AG.

Still, auto makers – and safety regulators in the U.S. and Europe – say they’re serious about pushing more autonomous braking and steering systems into cars and trucks, for one overriding reason: Most humans are depressingly bad drivers.